Selected Essays and Writing

“Social Media Ethos: Raising Awareness about Communication Center Programs and Outreach through the Use of Twitter”

I, along with a number of other EKU students and faculty, wrote an article for the Communication Center Journal about how communication centers should use Twitter to promote their services. A PDF of the article can be downloaded at the http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ccj/article/view/1946. The abstract is as follows:

Communication centers often develop a social media presence to engage with audiences about services, programs, and strategies. Twitter, as a popular social media platform, has been adopted by many communication centers. In this article, researchers from the Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) Noel Studio for Academic Creativity share strategies, best practices, and analysis for using Twitter tags, hashtags, and geotags to engage with different publics.

“Prolonged Sentences in David Foster Wallace’s ‘All That'”

This Fall 2018 essay was the recipient of the EKU English Department “Grammar and Linguistics Award,” which is awarded to a student by a panel of English faculty. The essay examines the grammatical techniques Wallace uses in his short story “All That” to create page-long sentences, and how the seemingly indulgent sentences are necessary to understanding the thematic content of the short story. The essay can be read here.

“Rhetorical Analysis of Political Humor Through Meme”

One of Adrian’s primary academic interests is right-wing misinformation campaigns, specifically as they are conducted through the sharing of Facebook memes. In his first academic exercise on the topic, Adrian wrote his Spring 2019 term essay for his class Visual Rhetoric (ENG 500) on one such meme. “Rhetorical Analysis of Political Humor Through Meme” can be read here.

Projects

Pedagogicast

As part of our Intro to Composition Studies class, classmate Breea Kirkpatrick and I created two episodes of a podcast called Pedagogicast, in which we interviewed two English composition instructors about their teaching philosophies. As well as editing the audio episodes, we developed a WordPress site that hosts the episodes and gives background info about us as hosts and individuals. Pedagogicast’s episodes can be found at bapedagogicast.wordpress.com.

Copy-Editing

In Spring 2019, I reconciled – meaning to ensure all entries in the References section were cited in the body of the text, and all citations in the body of the text had a corresponding References entry – the sources cited in sociology professor Dr. Paul Paolucci’s forthcoming book Acquiring Modernity: An Investigation into the Rise, Structure, and Future of the Modern World. The References section was approx. 80 pages, and the text of the book approx. 600 pages, which guaranteed the publication experience Adrian gained from the project was hard-earned.

Flipping a Classroom

I collaborated with anthropology professor Dr. Benjamin Freed on flipping his Intro to Physical Anthropology (ANT 201) class in Summer 2018. The philosophy behind a “flipped” classroom is that all course concepts and knowledge are delivered outside of class through reading, virtual lectures, quizzes, etc. The concepts and knowledge are then put into practice during the actual class time through labs and group exercises. I (along with fellow Noel Studio employee Abigail Byrd), having just taken the class in Spring 2018, provided Dr. Freed with feedback concerning our experience with the class and worked to incorporate the feedback into the flipped classroom format. Together, we developed and refined audio lectures, PowerPoint slides, and supplementary course material that would effectively deliver course content to students outside of class. We then refined lab projects that the students would perform during class time and made sure the implementation of the labs expanded on and enhanced the knowledge gained through the course material delivered outside of class time.